Kevin Weil
Operator in Residence, Scribble Ventures. On 4 shows, 6 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveoperatorinvestorfounder@kevinweil ↗LinkedIn ↗scribble.vc ↗
Kevin Weil is an executive and product leader who served as Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, President at Planet Labs, VP of Product at Instagram, and SVP of Product at Twitter. He also co-founded Meta's Libra/Novi cryptocurrency project, advises and invests with Scribble Ventures, and sits on the board of Cisco.
4shows
6appearances
73statements
10resolved
8supported
0contradicted
80%fully supported
37said about them ↓ Everything Kevin Weil said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Weil: 2026 for AI in science will mirror 2025 software engineering
“I think, 2026 for ai and science is going to look a lot like what 2025 looked like for soft ai and software engineering yeah where if you go back to the beginning of 2025 if you were using ai heavily to write your code you were sort of an early adopter and lik…”
Weil: OpenAI will not build industry-specific vertical AI products
“There are immense opportunities in every industry and every vertical in the world to go build AI based products that improve upon the state of the art. And there's just no way we could ever do that ourselves. We don't want to, we couldn't, if we did want to.”
Weil: OpenAI minimizes scaffolding because rapid advances erase model limits
“We don't spend that much time building scaffolding around the parts that don't match that because our general mindset is in two months, there's going to be a better model and it's going to blow away whatever, you know, the current set of limitations are.”
Weil admits OpenAI no longer holds a massive 12-month lead
“It used to be that OpenAI had this, like, massive model lead, you know, 12 months or something ahead of everybody else. That's not true anymore. You know, I like to think we still have a lead. I'd argue that we do, but it's certainly not a massive one.”
Weil: Organizations should stay PM-light to prevent micromanagement
“Too many PMs causes problems. You know, we'll like fill the world with decks and ideas versus execution. So I think that the, I think it's a good thing when you have a PM that has that is working with maybe slightly too many engineers, because it means that th…”
Weil predicts ML engineers will soon embed in every product team
“And so I think you're going to want sort of quasi researcher machine learning engineer types as part of pretty much every team because fine tuning a model is just going to be part of the core workflow for building most products.”
Weil: OpenAI manages 400 million weekly users with 30-40 support staff
“With 400 plus weekly 400 plus million weekly active users, we get, you know, a lot of inbound tickets, right? I don't know how many customer support folks we have, but it's not very many. 3040, I'm not sure. Way, way smaller than you would have at any comparab…”
Weil: Current AI models are already good enough for global tutoring
“The models are good enough to do it now, and every, every study out there that's ever been done seems to show that when you have, you know, classrooms is still, classroom, like education is still important, but when you combine that with personalized tutoring,…”
Weil: Prompt engineering will become obsolete as AI matures
“I want to kill the idea that you have to be a good prompt engineer. I think if we do our jobs, that stops being true. You know, it's just one of those, like, sharp edges of models that experts can learn, but then you just, over time, you shouldn't need to know…”
Weil: Current AI models are eval-limited rather than intelligence-limited
“I think there's a very real sense in which models today are not intelligence limited. They're eval limited. They can actually do much more and be much more correct on a wider range of things than they are today, and it's really about sort of teaching them.”
Weil: Frontier AI increasingly generates answers that evaluators prefer over humans
“The models are getting to the point where they can often beat humans at certain tasks. Like, people prefer the model's answers to a human's answers, and so if you're humans writing your evals, like, you know, so what does that mean?”
Weil: OpenAI customer support team is 20% expected size thanks to AI
“There are things that get closer to that, I mean, there, like, customer service, we have bots internally that do what's fun about answering external questions and fielding internal people's questions on Slack and so on, and our customer success, our customer s…”
Weil: Instagram Stories would have failed with a timid, experimental rollout
“If instead we'd done the timid thing and put it like in the back of a third tab and like, well, if people find it, we'll do a one percent experiment and maybe it'll work. Like it never would have taken off.”
Weil: OpenAI wants 100 external scientists to win Nobels with its AI
“Our goal is not To win a Nobel Prize ourselves, it is for a hundred scientists to win Nobel Prizes using our technology.”
The AI model you use today is the worst you will ever use
“The model that you use today is the worst AI model that you'll ever use for the rest of your life”
If an AI model partially works today, it will excel in months
“If the model can kind of do it, then it's going to be great at it in a few months.”
OpenAI will enter and compete in new product categories, says Kevin Weil
“And that's an opportunity for us in places where we think we can play a role. We, where we think we have a perspective. We'll go compete.”
Frontier AI capabilities cannot be managed top-down, argues Kevin Weil
“In an AI world, you need to do that because the IMLs are so new. We don't, you don't top down know all of the capabilities. You see them kind of coming through the mist and we're better at finding all of the opportunities when we have a lot of smart people Thi…”
Weil: Model accuracy levels dictate fundamentally different product designs
“If the model gets it right, 60% of the time, you build a very different product than if the model gets it right, 95% of the time, versus if the model gets it right, 99.5% of the time. And so there's also something that you have to get really into the weeds on …”
Weil: Multi-month product roadmaps in AI are pointless
“So that's, I think, just expecting that you're going to be super agile and that there's no sense writing a three month roadmap, let alone a year long roadmap, because the technology is changing underneath you so quickly.”
Weil: Developers Building on the Edge of Model Limits Should Persist
“If you're building And the product that you're building is kind of right on the edge of the capabilities of the models. Keep going, because you're doing something right. Because you give it another couple months, and the models are going to be great. And sudde…”
Weil: OpenAI operates with only about 25 product managers
“Not that many, actually. I don't know. 25. Maybe it's a little more than that”
Weil: Product teams should vibe-code interactive prototypes instead of using Figma
“Why shouldn't we be, like, vibe coding demos right, left, and center? Like, instead of showing stuff in, like, Figma, we should be showing prototypes that people are vibe coding, you know, over the course of 30 minutes to illustrate proofs of concept and to ex…”
The other half of the tape: Kevin Weil's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 37 times in 23 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Lenny Rachitsky 17Sherwin Wu 4Harry Stebbings 4Brad Gerstner 4David Lieb 3Todd Jackson 1Shawn Wang 1Jag Duggal 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Lenny's Podcast 21
20VC 9
BG2 Pod 5
Latent Space 2
2026 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- OpenAI’s head of platform engineering on the next 12-24 months of AI | Sherwin Wu
- AI’s third era: the rise of persistent AI coworkers | Tara Seshan (OpenAI’s product lead)
- 🔬How GPT‑5 derived new results in theoretical physics and quantum gravity — Alex Lupsasca, OpenAI
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 21 mentions in 14 episodes 2 per episode
- Inside ChatGPT: The fastest growing product in history | Nick Turley (OpenAI)
- Inside the expert network training every frontier AI model | Garrett Lord
- Coatue’s Laffont Brothers. AI, Public & VC Mkts, Macro, US Debt, Crypto, IPO's, & more | BG2 · Bg2 Pod
- Anthropic's CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram)
- The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell
- Inside OpenAI: 2026 is the year of agents, AI’s biggest bottleneck, and why compute isn’t the issue
- The $1B Al company training ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini on the path to responsible AGI | Edwin Chen
- From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2023 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2022 3 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Kevin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Operator in Residence, Scribble Ventures | 2 | 40 | 83% 5/6 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Operator in Residence, Scribble Ventures | 1 | 16 | 0% 0/1 | full record on 20VC → |
| LATENT SPACELEDGER | Operator in Residence, Scribble Ventures | 2 | 10 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Latent Space → |
| BG2LEDGER | Operator in Residence, Scribble Ventures | 1 | 7 | 100% 1/1 | full record on BG2 Pod → |